Showing results for "unabridged" in Family Life

Thirty years have passed since Greta left Marchmont Hall, a grand and beautiful house nestled in the hills of rural Monmouthshire. But when she returns to the Hall for Christmas she has no recollection of her past association with it – the result of a tragic accident that has blanked out more than two decades of her life. Then, during a walk through the wintry landscape, she stumbles across a grave in the woods and the weathered inscription on the headstone tells her that a little boy is buried here.

Chef and Restaurateur Jake Ruiz left Newport, Washington, and never looked back. After his parents had practically disowned him for being gay, the town was nothing but bad memories for Jake. But, years later, a family emergency brings him back to his hometown. Grappling with the death of his husband and suddenly finding himself a single father to his five-year-old, Jake also has to now deal with his disapproving mother, his ailing father, a crumbling family restaurant, and the sudden reintroduction of Jake's childhood crush into his life, Colton Humphrey.

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen’s adored brother, Declan, is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea, where the six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, must listen to and come to terms with one another.

Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them…in small doses, with their parents there to handle the tears and tricky questions. So when tragedy strikes and Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian, he is, honestly, overwhelmed.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

You Must Remember This is an eloquent jumble of a family story, as experienced by Grace, an elderly woman with dementia trying to get her moorings in a worsening storm. It contemplates the perils of remembering and forgetting, making your own way in the world and how we seem bound to repeat the patterns of the past. Most profoundly it's about sensing what it's like to live on while your faculties dim, and about finding peace.

In the aftermath of a flood that washes away much of a small Tennessee town, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men. In doing so, he starts to see his life anew - and risks losing everything: his wife, locked into her religious prejudices; his congregation, which shuns Asher after he delivers a passionate sermon in defense of tolerance; and his young son, Justin, caught in the middle of what turns into a bitter custody battle. With no way out but ahead, Asher takes Justin and flees to Key West, where he hopes to find his brother, Luke, whom he'd turned against years ago after Luke came out.

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat centre she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built.

In 1990, Vijay and Indu leave India for Australia, seeking a better life for their family. But the move isn't easy on anyone. Not gentle Indu who becomes disconnected from her family and her life; nor the ambitious Vijay, who finds himself unmoored in a culture he doesn't understand. At the centre is Archana, their quiet daughter, for whom a growing understanding of her own queerness grates against the realities of her life.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

Lewis Madigan is young, gay, out of work, and getting antsy when he’s roped into providing end-of-life care for his insufferable homophobic neighbor, Chester Wheeler. Lewis doesn’t need the aggravation, just the money. The only requirements: run errands, be on call, and put up with a miserable old churl no one else in Buffalo can bear. After exchanging barbs, bickering, baiting, and pushing buttons, Chester hits Lewis with the big ask. Lewis can’t say no to a dying wish.

Caught between his well-meaning yet misapprehending family, his boisterous friends, and his self-assured partner Ben, Elom struggles to fit in. All he ever wants is to feel understood – but what does it mean to live authentically when the only thing changing faster than the world around you is the world within? Moving between Accra, Glasgow, London, and the islands of the outer Hebrides, Selali Fiamanya’s extraordinary debut asks what it means to love and be loved in return. Before We Hit the Ground is an intimate portrait of a family, and one man’s struggle to find his place.

One winter's afternoon on Hampstead Heath in 1980, Elise Morceau meets Constance Holden and quickly falls under her spell. Connie is bold and alluring, a successful writer whose novel is being turned into a major Hollywood film. Elise follows Connie to LA, a city of strange dreams and swimming pools and late-night gatherings of glamorous people. But whilst Connie thrives on the heat and electricity of this new world where everyone is reaching for the stars and no one is telling the truth, Elise finds herself floundering.

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals and have politicians, doctors and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges listeners into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before, Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact.

As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.

Joey is young, indifferent. He’s drifting around Western Sydney, unaware of how his passivity might lead him even further adrift, off the rails, into a violent crime. Meanwhile his grandmother, Elaine—a proud Lebanese woman—tries to save face and hold herself together in the wake of Joey's actions. In her family, history repeats itself, vices come and go and uncovering long-buried secrets isn't always cathartic.

Saying that Benjamin Sean Quinn had "anger issues" was an understatement. For those who knew him for the shortest amount of time, his life was in order: He was physically fit, had a great job which provided him a house in the suburbs and the material things he desired, a loving, monogamous relationship, two happy, healthy daughters and an established circle of friends. In all accounts, his life seemed perfect. But to those who knew him the longest, they knew he was an idle grenade, waiting for someone to pull the pin.

When it first gets announced, the Leteo Institute's memory-alteration procedure seems too good to be true to Aaron Soto; miracle cure-alls don't tend to pop up in the Bronx projects. Aaron can't forget how he's grown up poor, how his friends all seem to shrug him off, and how his father committed suicide in their one-bedroom apartment. Then Thomas shows up. The love Aaron discovers may cost him what's left of his life. But since Aaron can't suddenly stop being gay, Leteo may be the only way out.

Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world. For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic duo, the friction of their differences driving them: Sharon, quietly ambitious but self-doubting; Mel, brash and unapologetic, always the life of the party. Best friends and artistic partners since the first week of college, where they bonded over their working-class roots and obvious talent, they spent their twenties ensconced in a gritty Brooklyn studio. Working, drinking, laughing.